8 ms·

tl;dr Connecting new power generation to the electricity grid is a queue-based permit system that is stupid and slow, but simple and supremely stable. There is

by fwlr 4y ago

tl;dr Connecting new power generation to the electricity grid is a queue-based permit system that is stupid and slow, but simple and supremely stable. There is a decent chunk of renewable power “in the queue” but speeding up the connection process risks damaging stability. The article notes India’s electrification as a partial counter-example: relatively fast, but correspondingly relatively unstable. (One marker mentioned was “kerosene liters consumed”, as a proxy for how much lighting has been replaced by electricity, they note the amount dropped from 9 billion liters to 2 billion liters, which I take as a very rough indicator of ~80% grid reliability - not even one “9“ of stability. It’s hard to find representative data on developed-world power grid reliability but for instance there is a common estimate that the average Australian resident experiences 200 minutes of power outage per year, which corresponds to somewhere above three-and-a-half 9s and below four 9s. This suggests potentially quite an extreme cost in stability for the moderate benefit of speeding up queue times for renewable power.)

andreareina 4y ago
If I understand correctly there's little slack in transmission capacity to service new supply, and that new transmission infra isn't built out until new generation is queued. What wasn't clear to me is if construction of the new generation has to be completed before it can be enqueued or if e.g. completed permitting is sufficient.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Anyone significant planning on new generation will also plan the interconnect at the same time, and that includes transmission capacity. There is no point in having your new generation completed if the interconnect isn't done. In fact the bank shouldn't (and probably is checking, though not always) let you get financing for the new generation if you have not verified that there is interconnect to use that generation. Thus plans for transmission is supposed to happen before you get to permits. Though depending on timelines you may start building on before the other. You putting solar on your roof is not significant. Your whole neighborhood putting solar up should be significant, but odds are this is done by individuals who don't realize their collective action is significant.
philippgerard 4y ago
The average outage time per year in Germany, as far as I remember, is below 2min. The uptime of my non-USV-backed server at home supports that, but that’s only anecdotal data.
- WJW 4y ago
  According to tennet.eu (the grid operator for the Netherlands and parts of Germany), the uptime for their high voltage grid is about 99.99963%. Obviously it will be lower for individual consumers, since there is a lower voltage grid in between them and the high voltage grid that might fail separately. Still, I think I've personally experienced only one power failure in the last 5 years or so.
- cfstras 4y ago
  Fellow German here, I’ve experienced a total of ~2 hours, in one single outage, about 20 years ago. Not even a single brownout since.
- fsh 4y ago
  In my experience, USVs can make the uptime worse in Germany. The hardware is likely to fail before the next blackout.
- cameronh90 4y ago
  The only power cut I've experienced since I've been in the UK (8 years) was about 30 seconds long. By the time the operator had sent me an SMS about it, it was already back up. This is despite the UK's rapid transition to renewables. There was a fairly major power cut by our standards in 2019, but it didn't affect me. Personally speaking, power cuts are so rare and short that I don't think about them or plan for them.
liampulles 4y ago
Here in South Africa the power can be off for anything from 2h to 8h a day and given the regularity of that interruption I've since gotten an inverter (with batteries) as well as several battery powered emergency lights to power me through. I know that many residents of India do something similar, and so I'm a little skeptical of this kerosene marker.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  A honest, but offtopic question (if Dang sees it fit to remove, let him do it...): why do you stay in SA at all? What are the redeeming qualities of the country, aside from the nature, which is fabulous? If you are white, aren't you afraid of a possible pogrom against your family?
  - ido 4y ago
    I'm not OP but it's incredibly hard to immigrate and as older people are less mobile/flexible it may mean leaving your elderly parents/grandparents behind, as well as your native culture and language and everyone/everything/everywhere you know.
  - liampulles 4y ago
    I am thinking about leaving SA - the usual factors of cost, family, and change apply. Redeeming qualities: I do have pretty good buying power in SA, the weather is great,and it is quite a multicultural place with friendly people by and large. To my knowledge the rate of black on black violent crime is higher than black on white crime - SA has a general problem of violent crime. Its definitely a problem but a pogrom specifically is not a chief concern for me.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      Thank you for an interesting reply. I come from a fairly safe country, so I cannot really imagine how living in an unsafe country looks like. What precautions do people in SA need to take when travelling? Is there any sort of constantly updated "off-limits area map", or is it just common knowledge? How does security in wealthier neighbourhoods look like? Is hiking in the wild risky? Is public transport generally to be avoided, or are there "better and worse" services? As far as electricity blackouts go, everyone has a generator, right? Is there never a shortage of diesel for those generators? What about the pollution that comes from running generators several hours a day?
com2kid 4y ago
I think reliability should be divided up in different ways. Their is "how well the moving bits are moving" which is different than "lines getting knocked down by acts of nature". So, for example, I live in Seattle. Our power generation is quite reliable, but trees falling down during wind storms and knocking out power lines is also reliable, gravity being what it is. I don't consider the Seattle grid to be unreliable, though I do acknowledge that digging up the entire city and burying power lines would, at great expense, prevent nearly all power outages. But that sort of unreliability feels different than brown outs.
- bluGill 4y ago
  My utility concluded that between underground animals chewing wires, idiots with backhoes not locating before digging, and the extra time effort to repair burred lines: overall overhead wires are more reliable than underground. Note that they put a lot of effort into tree trimming near their overhead wires, which made trees falling on them was a rare problem.
friendzis 4y ago
If you want to really analyze this you have to look at outage distributions (both size and duration). High voltage line disconnecting and leaving half a city in the dark for an hour is weighted-outage-time equal to one town sitting without heating for a week. However, it would be quite hard to call such disconnections equal.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Centralized grid instability is not going to stop new power generation from coming online. Decentralized power generation is what's already happening in countries with inadequate grids. People install batteries, solar, wind mills, generators etc. Anything they can do to mitigate against loss of power or unacceptably high prices for power. The more unstable the grid is, the more people do this. Just look at most of the developing world. There are lots of countries that never had much of a functioning grid where economic growth is creating demand that cannot be met by their electricity grid. In most of these places, people just go ahead and fix things themselves. And that increasingly means solar panels and batteries rather than expensive to operate generators. In the UK, and elsewhere, there are a lot of home owners that have solar on their roofs. The reason is not power outages but electricity prices. And with recent price spikes, more people are considering doing that all over the world. The whole assumption that most new generation has to come from the grid is increasingly less true. Both companies and consumers invest in cheaper private power generation. Especially companies have a big incentive to reduce their cost. The more power they need, the bigger the potential savings. And of course increased demand with a limited supply creates price spikes as well. We saw that in the last few years. This just speeds up the decentralization. Australia is a good example. About a third of the houses have solar panels already and the building codes are being updated to require solar panels for new construction and renovation projects. Millions of house holds generating tens of kwh every day is adding up to a lot of power. And a lot of it goes straight into the grid as well. Which adds to the instability. Lots more will be coming online in the next few years.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Rural Canada is also a good example. The grid is horrendously bad and it is pretty easy to outperform the grid reliability wise with a local solar/wind/battery setup. You might even go off-grid completely assuming a large enough battery and maybe a backup generator just in case.
_hypx 4y ago
Interestingly enough, Tesla just released their "Master Plan 3" which admits the need for hydrogen for seasonal energy storage and synthetic fuels. It doesn't admit the need for nuclear though. So we can see it as a first step to coming to reality, but it is not there yet. I bring this up because I am constantly annoyed by those who really haven't thought through their green energy dreams, and forget that compromises need to exist. These compromises actually have no serious penalties whatsoever BTW, it just requires a more complexity thinking process. And in this case, it means that there will be a lot of times where the solution is to build a gas turbine running on hydrogen, ammonia, synthetic fuels, etc., or build a nuclear reactor. Just piling up more and more renewables onto the grid isn't a solution. We are finally seeing some people come to reality on this, and I expect even further shifts to more realistic thinking in the future.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > These compromises actually have no serious penalties whatsoever BTW, it just requires a more complexity thinking process. Not entirely true, storage does cost money: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Storage%20Cost%20and%20Performance%20Characterization%20Report_Final.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Stora... That said, as the tables in that report indicate its quite a complex topic. (By my back of the envelope maths switching UK to fully wind and storage would triple electricity prices)
  - _hypx 4y ago
    Relative to the alternatives, it does not cost more money. You just need to accept the existence of hydrogen-based energy storage and perhaps synthetic fuels too. Cost will be the same or less as other energy storage ideas. And if you accept nuclear, you don’t even need much energy storage at all. Also, a big chunk of the “energy storage” solution is utilizing biofuels. Like in Germany where wood burning power plants are seen as green (hint: they’re not). Getting rid of this will be a huge boon. The compromise in question will have significant environmental benefits. It’s unfortunate that so many are blind to their own bad ideas and have not noticed the problems of biofuels.
leoedin 4y ago
Grid stability is essentially a different thing than local power availability. You lose your power if a tree falls on your power line, or if your local transformer fails. Sad for you, but completely unrelated to grid stability. Grid instability happens when load and supply are no longer matched. That's when serious things have to happen - load shedding and rolling blackouts. In the developed world we put a lot of money into avoiding this - pumped hydro, battery storage, fast response gas turbines, frequency control programs running with big industrial users, and (opt-in) load shedding of big industrial users. All so that power is available to an end user who needs it.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  As someone living under PG&E, I'd love improvements to both. In the late summer we often lose power due to under-supply, in fall due to concern for fire, and in winter due to wind. In one recent month I was out of power for eight days in three tranches.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    PG&E is an excellent example of grid failure through regulatory failure. California has made a mess of electrical regulation over the decades, and today you have to suffer through the result.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      I split my blame with roughly 2/3 going to CPUC and the rest going to PG&E.
- fwlr 4y ago
  Yeah, like I said it’s really hard to find representative data on grid stability. Local power outages will definitely overestimate grid instability by a lot, but it’s not entirely unrelated, it should capture ~most of grid stability issues (it is a gross over-estimate because maybe like 1%-5% of the total local power outage experienced is due to grid instability). So maybe the electrical grid is more like 5 or 6 nines.
Reason077 4y ago
> "speeding up the connection process risks damaging stability" The UK has transitioned to renewables perhaps faster than any other major economy in the past decade[1], yet has a very reliable and resilient grid[2]. [1] As recently as 2012, around 45% of the UK's electricity was generated from coal. Now it's almost zero, with the last coal power plants to close by 2025. In the same period, renewables have grown from <5% to over 40% of grid supply. [2] "Five 9s" transmission system reliability of supply nationally in 2021-22: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/industry-information/industry-data-and-reports/system-performance-reports https://www.nationalgrideso.com/industry-information/industr...
- ephbit 4y ago
  Well. I suppose this stability is mostly thanks to (A) natural gas and (B) biomass, aka wood pellets being burnt in former coal power plants. Those two basically replaced the coal that was phased out. See this plot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?time=2014..latest&country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by... Agree, the speed of transition has been quite fast. As you can see in the following plot the UK started out at a rather low level of renewables. At this relatively low level the transition is probably easier than at higher levels. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-electricity-production-from-renewable-sources?country=OWID_WRL~GBR~DEU~CHN~USA~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-electricity-prod... I'd guess the real challenge with grid stability will become more visible when grids all over the world reach some 2/3..3/4 of renewables.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    Good management must also be counted as a factor, I think. Whatever that entails.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    I don't think that chart really makes your case since it's measuring total production and on a total production basis it simply isn't true that gas and biomass replaced coal. If you pull that chart to its full timeline, over 200TWh of coal production existed, and it's essentially all gone now, but there isn't 200TWh of gas and biomass, in total they're maybe 140TWh. There is 60 TWh of wind power production. Now, in terms of capacity for instantaneous power, the Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants probably do add up to similar capacity to older coal plants which were phased out, at least very close, but it's pretty rare for all that generation to actually be needed - this chart doesn't really show that. As to "transition" the countries which look "slower" on this chart are mostly using a lot of hydro, which is very different from wind or solar, as well as being readily available from the mid-20th century a point where solar and wind power were not really established options. So we're not talking about China having a bunch of wind turbines, then kicking back for a decade and only adding more recently, but instead their enormous country has hydro power, and now it also is adding wind turbines. The UK is a small island (and some other even smaller islands which are useful for wind but don't produce hydro power) and doesn't have vast majestic water bodies like Lake Mead, so hydro power has always been a tiny niche here, and that's all you're really looking at.
IanCal 4y ago
> One marker mentioned was “kerosene liters consumed”, as a proxy for how much lighting has been replaced by electricity, they note the amount dropped from 9 billion liters to 2 billion liters, which I take as a very rough indicator of ~80% grid reliability I don't think those are related at all. Someone without electrical infrastructure running to their village is going to burn fuel regardless of how reliable the grid would be.
tshanmu 4y ago
Kerosene was subsidised heavily as it was used for cooking stoves widely. At some point kerosene subsidy was removed and people shifted to battery based backup systems/ lights etc. Electricity is unstable in large parts is my experience.
dmurray 4y ago
The kerosene they are talking about was for burning in backup generators, not lamps. Grid power dwarfed that produced by local generators even when it was 9 billion litres. 80% stability isn't the right conclusion from this.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by fwlr 4y ago

andreareina 4y ago

If I understand correctly there's little slack in transmission capacity to service new supply, and that new transmission infra isn't built out until new generation is queued. What wasn't clear to me is if construction of the new generation has to be completed before it can be enqueued or if e.g. completed permitting is sufficient.

bluGill 4y ago
Anyone significant planning on new generation will also plan the interconnect at the same time, and that includes transmission capacity. There is no point in having your new generation completed if the interconnect isn't done. In fact the bank shouldn't (and probably is checking, though not always) let you get financing for the new generation if you have not verified that there is interconnect to use that generation. Thus plans for transmission is supposed to happen before you get to permits. Though depending on timelines you may start building on before the other. You putting solar on your roof is not significant. Your whole neighborhood putting solar up should be significant, but odds are this is done by individuals who don't realize their collective action is significant.

philippgerard 4y ago

The average outage time per year in Germany, as far as I remember, is below 2min. The uptime of my non-USV-backed server at home supports that, but that’s only anecdotal data.

WJW 4y ago
According to tennet.eu (the grid operator for the Netherlands and parts of Germany), the uptime for their high voltage grid is about 99.99963%. Obviously it will be lower for individual consumers, since there is a lower voltage grid in between them and the high voltage grid that might fail separately. Still, I think I've personally experienced only one power failure in the last 5 years or so.
cfstras 4y ago
Fellow German here, I’ve experienced a total of ~2 hours, in one single outage, about 20 years ago. Not even a single brownout since.
fsh 4y ago
In my experience, USVs can make the uptime worse in Germany. The hardware is likely to fail before the next blackout.
cameronh90 4y ago
The only power cut I've experienced since I've been in the UK (8 years) was about 30 seconds long. By the time the operator had sent me an SMS about it, it was already back up. This is despite the UK's rapid transition to renewables. There was a fairly major power cut by our standards in 2019, but it didn't affect me. Personally speaking, power cuts are so rare and short that I don't think about them or plan for them.

liampulles 4y ago

Here in South Africa the power can be off for anything from 2h to 8h a day and given the regularity of that interruption I've since gotten an inverter (with batteries) as well as several battery powered emergency lights to power me through. I know that many residents of India do something similar, and so I'm a little skeptical of this kerosene marker.

inglor_cz 4y ago
A honest, but offtopic question (if Dang sees it fit to remove, let him do it...): why do you stay in SA at all? What are the redeeming qualities of the country, aside from the nature, which is fabulous? If you are white, aren't you afraid of a possible pogrom against your family?
- ido 4y ago
  I'm not OP but it's incredibly hard to immigrate and as older people are less mobile/flexible it may mean leaving your elderly parents/grandparents behind, as well as your native culture and language and everyone/everything/everywhere you know.
- liampulles 4y ago
  I am thinking about leaving SA - the usual factors of cost, family, and change apply. Redeeming qualities: I do have pretty good buying power in SA, the weather is great,and it is quite a multicultural place with friendly people by and large. To my knowledge the rate of black on black violent crime is higher than black on white crime - SA has a general problem of violent crime. Its definitely a problem but a pogrom specifically is not a chief concern for me.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Thank you for an interesting reply. I come from a fairly safe country, so I cannot really imagine how living in an unsafe country looks like. What precautions do people in SA need to take when travelling? Is there any sort of constantly updated "off-limits area map", or is it just common knowledge? How does security in wealthier neighbourhoods look like? Is hiking in the wild risky? Is public transport generally to be avoided, or are there "better and worse" services? As far as electricity blackouts go, everyone has a generator, right? Is there never a shortage of diesel for those generators? What about the pollution that comes from running generators several hours a day?

com2kid 4y ago

I think reliability should be divided up in different ways. Their is "how well the moving bits are moving" which is different than "lines getting knocked down by acts of nature". So, for example, I live in Seattle. Our power generation is quite reliable, but trees falling down during wind storms and knocking out power lines is also reliable, gravity being what it is. I don't consider the Seattle grid to be unreliable, though I do acknowledge that digging up the entire city and burying power lines would, at great expense, prevent nearly all power outages. But that sort of unreliability feels different than brown outs.

bluGill 4y ago
My utility concluded that between underground animals chewing wires, idiots with backhoes not locating before digging, and the extra time effort to repair burred lines: overall overhead wires are more reliable than underground. Note that they put a lot of effort into tree trimming near their overhead wires, which made trees falling on them was a rare problem.

friendzis 4y ago

If you want to really analyze this you have to look at outage distributions (both size and duration). High voltage line disconnecting and leaving half a city in the dark for an hour is weighted-outage-time equal to one town sitting without heating for a week. However, it would be quite hard to call such disconnections equal.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Centralized grid instability is not going to stop new power generation from coming online. Decentralized power generation is what's already happening in countries with inadequate grids. People install batteries, solar, wind mills, generators etc. Anything they can do to mitigate against loss of power or unacceptably high prices for power. The more unstable the grid is, the more people do this. Just look at most of the developing world. There are lots of countries that never had much of a functioning grid where economic growth is creating demand that cannot be met by their electricity grid. In most of these places, people just go ahead and fix things themselves. And that increasingly means solar panels and batteries rather than expensive to operate generators. In the UK, and elsewhere, there are a lot of home owners that have solar on their roofs. The reason is not power outages but electricity prices. And with recent price spikes, more people are considering doing that all over the world. The whole assumption that most new generation has to come from the grid is increasingly less true. Both companies and consumers invest in cheaper private power generation. Especially companies have a big incentive to reduce their cost. The more power they need, the bigger the potential savings. And of course increased demand with a limited supply creates price spikes as well. We saw that in the last few years. This just speeds up the decentralization. Australia is a good example. About a third of the houses have solar panels already and the building codes are being updated to require solar panels for new construction and renovation projects. Millions of house holds generating tens of kwh every day is adding up to a lot of power. And a lot of it goes straight into the grid as well. Which adds to the instability. Lots more will be coming online in the next few years.

jacquesm 4y ago
Rural Canada is also a good example. The grid is horrendously bad and it is pretty easy to outperform the grid reliability wise with a local solar/wind/battery setup. You might even go off-grid completely assuming a large enough battery and maybe a backup generator just in case.

_hypx 4y ago

Interestingly enough, Tesla just released their "Master Plan 3" which admits the need for hydrogen for seasonal energy storage and synthetic fuels. It doesn't admit the need for nuclear though. So we can see it as a first step to coming to reality, but it is not there yet. I bring this up because I am constantly annoyed by those who really haven't thought through their green energy dreams, and forget that compromises need to exist. These compromises actually have no serious penalties whatsoever BTW, it just requires a more complexity thinking process. And in this case, it means that there will be a lot of times where the solution is to build a gas turbine running on hydrogen, ammonia, synthetic fuels, etc., or build a nuclear reactor. Just piling up more and more renewables onto the grid isn't a solution. We are finally seeing some people come to reality on this, and I expect even further shifts to more realistic thinking in the future.

concordDance 4y ago
> These compromises actually have no serious penalties whatsoever BTW, it just requires a more complexity thinking process. Not entirely true, storage does cost money: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Storage%20Cost%20and%20Performance%20Characterization%20Report_Final.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Stora... That said, as the tables in that report indicate its quite a complex topic. (By my back of the envelope maths switching UK to fully wind and storage would triple electricity prices)
- _hypx 4y ago
  Relative to the alternatives, it does not cost more money. You just need to accept the existence of hydrogen-based energy storage and perhaps synthetic fuels too. Cost will be the same or less as other energy storage ideas. And if you accept nuclear, you don’t even need much energy storage at all. Also, a big chunk of the “energy storage” solution is utilizing biofuels. Like in Germany where wood burning power plants are seen as green (hint: they’re not). Getting rid of this will be a huge boon. The compromise in question will have significant environmental benefits. It’s unfortunate that so many are blind to their own bad ideas and have not noticed the problems of biofuels.

leoedin 4y ago

Grid stability is essentially a different thing than local power availability. You lose your power if a tree falls on your power line, or if your local transformer fails. Sad for you, but completely unrelated to grid stability. Grid instability happens when load and supply are no longer matched. That's when serious things have to happen - load shedding and rolling blackouts. In the developed world we put a lot of money into avoiding this - pumped hydro, battery storage, fast response gas turbines, frequency control programs running with big industrial users, and (opt-in) load shedding of big industrial users. All so that power is available to an end user who needs it.

zbrozek 4y ago
As someone living under PG&E, I'd love improvements to both. In the late summer we often lose power due to under-supply, in fall due to concern for fire, and in winter due to wind. In one recent month I was out of power for eight days in three tranches.
- Kalium 4y ago
  PG&E is an excellent example of grid failure through regulatory failure. California has made a mess of electrical regulation over the decades, and today you have to suffer through the result.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    I split my blame with roughly 2/3 going to CPUC and the rest going to PG&E.
fwlr 4y ago
Yeah, like I said it’s really hard to find representative data on grid stability. Local power outages will definitely overestimate grid instability by a lot, but it’s not entirely unrelated, it should capture ~most of grid stability issues (it is a gross over-estimate because maybe like 1%-5% of the total local power outage experienced is due to grid instability). So maybe the electrical grid is more like 5 or 6 nines.

Reason077 4y ago

> "speeding up the connection process risks damaging stability" The UK has transitioned to renewables perhaps faster than any other major economy in the past decade[1], yet has a very reliable and resilient grid[2]. [1] As recently as 2012, around 45% of the UK's electricity was generated from coal. Now it's almost zero, with the last coal power plants to close by 2025. In the same period, renewables have grown from <5% to over 40% of grid supply. [2] "Five 9s" transmission system reliability of supply nationally in 2021-22: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/industry-information/industry-data-and-reports/system-performance-reports https://www.nationalgrideso.com/industry-information/industr...

ephbit 4y ago
Well. I suppose this stability is mostly thanks to (A) natural gas and (B) biomass, aka wood pellets being burnt in former coal power plants. Those two basically replaced the coal that was phased out. See this plot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?time=2014..latest&country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by... Agree, the speed of transition has been quite fast. As you can see in the following plot the UK started out at a rather low level of renewables. At this relatively low level the transition is probably easier than at higher levels. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-electricity-production-from-renewable-sources?country=OWID_WRL~GBR~DEU~CHN~USA~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-electricity-prod... I'd guess the real challenge with grid stability will become more visible when grids all over the world reach some 2/3..3/4 of renewables.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Good management must also be counted as a factor, I think. Whatever that entails.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  I don't think that chart really makes your case since it's measuring total production and on a total production basis it simply isn't true that gas and biomass replaced coal. If you pull that chart to its full timeline, over 200TWh of coal production existed, and it's essentially all gone now, but there isn't 200TWh of gas and biomass, in total they're maybe 140TWh. There is 60 TWh of wind power production. Now, in terms of capacity for instantaneous power, the Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants probably do add up to similar capacity to older coal plants which were phased out, at least very close, but it's pretty rare for all that generation to actually be needed - this chart doesn't really show that. As to "transition" the countries which look "slower" on this chart are mostly using a lot of hydro, which is very different from wind or solar, as well as being readily available from the mid-20th century a point where solar and wind power were not really established options. So we're not talking about China having a bunch of wind turbines, then kicking back for a decade and only adding more recently, but instead their enormous country has hydro power, and now it also is adding wind turbines. The UK is a small island (and some other even smaller islands which are useful for wind but don't produce hydro power) and doesn't have vast majestic water bodies like Lake Mead, so hydro power has always been a tiny niche here, and that's all you're really looking at.

IanCal 4y ago

> One marker mentioned was “kerosene liters consumed”, as a proxy for how much lighting has been replaced by electricity, they note the amount dropped from 9 billion liters to 2 billion liters, which I take as a very rough indicator of ~80% grid reliability I don't think those are related at all. Someone without electrical infrastructure running to their village is going to burn fuel regardless of how reliable the grid would be.

tshanmu 4y ago

Kerosene was subsidised heavily as it was used for cooking stoves widely. At some point kerosene subsidy was removed and people shifted to battery based backup systems/ lights etc. Electricity is unstable in large parts is my experience.

dmurray 4y ago

The kerosene they are talking about was for burning in backup generators, not lamps. Grid power dwarfed that produced by local generators even when it was 9 billion litres. 80% stability isn't the right conclusion from this.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]